Work Text:
When Lachlan first fell away into the sky, felt the Black Hole (Black Hole)’s inevitable gravity dragging him out of the tentative calm of Atlantis’ shadows in the Vault and into a maelstrom of shadows, his first thought had been, well, at least it can’t get any worse.
He was right, like he usually was, but he was wrong too.
When he stood again it was in the street of a grand city, which spread out into the distance under a cloudless blue sky. The vague haze of summer heat warped the view when he looked into the distance, watched the street disappear. It looked like Toronto, but he hadn’t been to Toronto since before he had signed up for blaseball, so he wasn’t sure if it looked anything like Toronto at all really. It felt like Toronto, though. Was there a new team here? Or…
His phone buzzed in his pocket, startling him from where he had been staring at the movement of people in and out of an underground subway station.
“Lachlan!! Lachlan hi! Oh my god Lachlan, holy shit, I’m glad you picked up.”
“Simon?” he asked, looking around incredulously as if ae was going to jump out from the crowd, magically here again. They had been texting and calling through the whole mess that had been the end of season 24/the end of the world, right up until ae had completely forgotten who he was after the Thieves had hit the Desert and been Scattered. After that, the texting had become a bit more one-sided.
“Simon? Is that – is that really you? You remember me?”
“I… sort of? I’m so sorry, your number was in my phone and I remembered wanting to call you and that I love you but I… I don’t remember everything else, but I know I love you and…
“I love you too. Simon, you’ve gotta slow down though,” he said, cutting through their anxious mile-a-minute speech, his voice nice and slow, and he could hear Simon calming a bit. “I’m just glad you’re safe. We’re going to figure this out, okay? Where are you? I’ll come get you, I’m – uh. I think I’m in Toronto. Wait…”
“In Toronto?” Simon said, confused. “I’m um, not in Toronto. I don’t even know if I’m on the plane at all… like I’m in space. I can’t even see the plane. Is your team there?”
“No,” Lachlan said, “I don’t see any other players. Just regular people.”
There was something at the edge of his understanding, something subtly off. He turned around again, scanning the traffic in the street, the pedestrians passing by him without a second glance.
“Okay. Okay, okay.” Simon said, trying to catch ixs breath. “I don’t… I don’t quite remember what happened but it was big, right? Wait. Do you think maybe we’re just… done now? Like no more blaseball? Is that why I’m back here? Because if we were then maybe I…”
Simon’s voice faded out for a moment as Lachlan caught the edge of a thought, leaned in to look more closely at the station in front of him.
“It’s under construction.” He muttered, putting a hand up to a security gate to feel the metal.
“What is?”
“This station. It was under construction, when I came here, when I was ten. It’s still under construction.”
“So?”
“This isn’t Toronto. Not the real one, anyway.”
He slumped to the ground, back against the gate as the people flowed around him like fish in a stream. Shit.
“We’re still in the Black Hole (Black Hole).”
Above him, for just a moment, that cloudless blue sky flickered entirely black.
---
He had no idea how to make his way to wherever Simon was, so they stayed on the phone, talking about anything and nothing, while Lachlan wandered around whatever kind of Toronto this was.
It felt weirdly normal, after a while. It felt almost identical to a real city, if you weren’t looking for the differences. People looked like people, stores looked like stores; hell, it even smelled right – without the sea air he remembered from Halifax, but still that rich complex blend of car exhaust and that late summer heat-smell.
After a few hours, he stopped, staring incredulously at a little bistro with a cheery awning and swoopy lettering on the glass.
“Lachlan? Lachlan? Are you still here?” Simon said, and Lachlan realized suddenly that he had been staring for long enough that he had been completely ignoring mir for who knows how long.
“I am.” Lachlan said, almost wanting to go inside, and almost wanting to turn around. It couldn’t be real, couldn’t be here – but then again, nothing was real, was it? Not in here, anyway.
The bistro was called Althea’s. Althea was his mother’s name, and it had been the name he had dreamed about opening a restaurant under since he was a teenager. She had always been one of his strongest supporters, carefully teaching him the techniques and recipes she knew at first, and then taking him to his first cooking classes and bringing back obscure ingredients for him to experiment with.
Now, this place was here, named after her. He wanted to call it a coincidence, but he knew that of course it wasn’t. Nothing was, not anymore. This was his bistro, for whatever arbitrary reason the black hole (black hole) had to put it here. Probably to snatch it out from under him tomorrow, set it on fire or pick it up and drop him in it in Antarctica and then blow it up somehow anyway. Classic blaseball antics.
Well, fuck that. He wasn’t falling for it, whatever this was. He turned around, and was about to step away when the background noise on the call shifted, Simon’s voice suddenly surrounded by the warm hubbub of other voices.
“Woah – Lachlan? I’m not in space anymore, it kinda looks like, uh…”
He almost didn’t turn around. Who knew if the voice on the phone even was Simon, for starters. It could be whatever had simulated the restaurant, trying to lure him in. And anyways, Simon could be anywhere, it wasn’t like there weren’t lots of loud places sky could be that weren’t Althea’s. His instincts were yelling at him to turn around and not get into things likely to get him hurt or killed, like they had been for years.
He'd been ignoring them for years, too. What else was he supposed to do? Blaseball was a walking warning sign, but there was nothing he could do about that, and besides, if there was any chance Simon was in there, he had to try, even if it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.
He crossed the threshold with his breath held, as if that would stave off whatever was inside, but he inhaled almost in spite of himself as soon as it hit him – the scent of fresh herbs and rich sauce and warm-baked desserts. Simon was seated alone at a table, looking around with wide eyes, but as soon as she saw Lachlan she lit up and stood, waving at him, and he rushed over and pulled her into a tight hug that seemed to go on forever.
After Simon reluctantly let him go, ce took his hand and squeezed it tightly, which Lachlan returned.
“Lachlan oh my god, this is so weird but I’m so glad I found you, do you know what this place is, or…?”
Just then, a waiter came to their table and, with a little flourish, set a pair of baked pasta dishes in front of each of them, with a little wedge of what looked like fresh-baked garlic bread.
“The homestyle bake for each of you.” the waiter said.
“Uh – thank you.” Lachlan said, confused, but the waiter cut off his next question with one of their own.
“And the kitchen wanted me to confirm that you still want to do the French Onion soup and greens tonight, correct?”
“What?” Lachlan asked, looked to Simon as if te would know, but te just shrugged.
“As the dinner special.” The waiter repeated, looking at him like he might be confused. “And that you’ll join the kitchen when you’re finished your meal, correct?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure.” He said, after a long pause, and the waiter smiled again.
“I’ll let the kitchen know,” they said, then rushed off, leaving Lachlan to take a deep breath and turn to Simon, who looked almost… excited?
“We should probably go,” Lachlan said, tugging a little on Simon’s hand. “Before they come back. Maybe you go first, pretend you’re going to the bathroom, and then I’ll follow in a few minutes.”
“Wait, why?” Simon asked, beaming at him. “Look, it’s not like I have any idea what’s going on, but – this is your restaurant, isn’t it? Like the one you always wanted to open? Look, they’ve even got the fresh herb planters in that little alcove, I remember you telling me about that! Why are you in such a rush?”
“It’s not real.” Lachlan said. “And it might be dangerous.”
“Lachlan. You’ve been dreaming about this since you were a kid. Can’t we just at least try the food?”
He looked down at the pasta, which really did smell great.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.” He reiterated, ignoring the sudden protests of his own stomach.
“Seriously, what’s the worst that can happen? We’re already literally in a black hole.”
“…so many things. Double incineration. Antarctic dynamite blast. Really bad food poisoning except it somehow sends us to Hades. Again.”
He looked up, and Simon was making his patented puppydog eyes, full lip quiver and all. It wasn’t so much that the face itself worked on him, or at least it wouldn’t have on anyone else, but more that back when they were in college Simon used to use it all the time whenever he wanted to do something fun with him and… okay maybe it did work on him. Just a bit.
“…Okay.” He said, hesitating before picking up a fork. “But if it gets weird, we leave. Like immediately.”
“Of course!” Simon said, already shoving a massive bite of pasta into neir mouth.
Lachlan, more tentatively, picked up a piece and examined it in the light, then tasted it carefully.
“Holy shit.” He said, incredulous.
“Damn dude, you run one hell of a restaurant,” Simon said, through another mouthful.
---
When they had both finished, Lachlan still sort of wanted to slip out, but Simon encouraged him until he found himself tying on an apron just behind the big swinging doors to the staff areas and stepping into the busy kitchen.
As he entered, he almost expected the staff to demand he leave, but instead they all greeted him warmly, as if they knew him, a few even patting his shoulder as he took the only unoccupied station.
He hadn’t been in a commercial kitchen since culinary school, and had never done anything like the head chef position before. The first few dishes were a bit rocky as he remembered all the old techniques and got the hang of the recipes, but after a while, he got into a rhythm and it came back to him, so much more than he would have assumed it would.
Over the next few hours, he delivered a great dinner service, just like he’d dreamed of when he was a little kid, just like he’d written up menus for in culinary school. One of those menus was framed, actually, in a little staff room in the back where he’d sat with one of those French Onion Soups, neat and tidy handwriting on a college lined notebook. He was pretty sure he’d lost that page in that first move, down to Hades, when he’d had to sell half the crap in his apartment in the few days between seasons. Sure looked nice up there now.
When the final guests had filed out and all the staff had gotten their meals, and everything was clean, he’d come back to their table, where Simon was still sitting, nursing a post-dinner coffee.
“How did it go?” shi asked, grinning like shi was barely holding back an I-told-you-so.
“Good.” Lachlan said, though he was sure the warmth in his voice as he said it sort of said all that needed to be known anyway.
“Sounds… good.” Simon said, eyes still twinkling. “Let’s head back to the apartment then.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Lachlan asked. “Apartment?”
“Now, see, I was talking with my new buddy April over there…” at this, Simon indicated one of the waiters, who gave a little wave, “and she was mentioning how much fun she had at the party we threw at our apartment. The one that’s right above the bistro. Convenient, right?”
“We don’t have an apartment here, we literally just got here.”
At this, Simon grinned even more impishly, fishing around in her pockets for something and then producing a little golden key.
“Wanna bet?” they asked.
---
The apartment was, in a word, perfect. Lachlan’s apartment back in Halifax had been…functional, for sure, but his furniture had largely remained unchanged since right after university, before he had started playing blaseball. He had a decently set up kitchen, but had never treated himself to any of the things he really wanted – the fancy properly weighted knives, a brand name mixer instead of the one he’d bought from a big box store as a starter option and never replaced that fell apart every few weeks, that kind of thing.
This place was different. There were huge windows, overlooking the city and the bistro (his bistro), and new furniture, art on the walls. There was a shelf full of books and magazines, a DSLR camera proudly displayed on top next to a few framed photos that looked to be locations around the city. He even recognized a print he had meant to buy, way back years ago, only a few days before getting feedbacked to Charleston, and after that it had been less of a priority.
Simon’s stuff was there too – her toothbrush in the bathroom, a blanket he had given her as a gift draped over the arm of the couch, photos of the two of them doing things they’d never actually gotten the chance to do up on the walls. The two of them in what looked like the Netherlands, enjoying a coffee in Paris, hiking somewhere cold, Lachlan looking miserable but somehow still fulfilled.
“Hey, you’ve got Steel Sailor!” Simon said, holding up a DVD of a show they’d wanted to see… oh, probably a decade ago, at that point. “We could watch that!”
“Yeah,” Lachlan said, half distracted still by all of it. By the unreality of it all. It looked like an apartment, and it felt like an apartment, but for just a moment, if he really focused on it, he could see through – flashes of dark gravity puddling in the corners, dripping off the photographs, clinging to the lovingly made fresh loaf of bread cooling on the counter. The black hole (black hole.) He didn’t know why it had made this, didn’t know what kind of trap this was.
“Cool, cool!” Simon said. “I can set it up!”
Lachlan watched the gravity puddle on the floor, then let it flicker back to clean tile, then looked through again. All of a sudden, he felt like he couldn’t breathe, so he said, “I’m just going to grab some fresh air for a moment then I’ll come back with some popcorn, okay?”
“Yeah sure!” Simon replied, already fiddling with the television. Lachlan slipped out onto the balcony and leaned heavily on the railing and watched the city below.
Stupid perfect apartment. Stupid perfect bistro, stupid perfect city.
He hated all of it.
How could he not? He looked up and saw the blank black sky flashing through the glittering stars and the haze of the city and he knew, without a shred of doubt, that it was not real. It wasn’t. It never would be. It was nothing but a mockery of the things he wanted and could never have, not anymore. That was enough for it to lodge in his throat and curdle everything until he could barely stomach any of it.
---
When Lachlan had woken up in a strange bed a few weeks later, in a room full of tchotchkes and Christmas paraphernalia, for a moment he had almost believed that too. Sure, he was annoyed at the Christmas stuff, but there was some Hanukkah themed stuff too, and Simon was there and that was good, at least.
What – of course Simon was here, he thought to himself, as he eased his way out of bed and went to go make breakfast for the two of them. They were married. Where else would she be?
He managed to make it all the way through the hollandaise sauce before the sense of wrongness really caught up with him again, and then it pretty much just didn’t leave.
Christmas Town, which was what he took to calling the strange, cutesy little village town they’d woken up in, was worse than fake Toronto. It was hard to think and hard to remember anything from outside, and it seemed like almost no one else remembered anything at all. Amos seemed to get it, when he talked to her, and that was nice, but she wasn’t particularly concerned about any of it, like she usually wasn’t. Everyone else seemed various degrees of blissfully out of it. This place had even produced something that looked like Ziwa, and sure Eugenia looked happy about it, but this Ziwa made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. It wasn’t Ziwa – was some kind of fake, creepy thing that just happened to look like them, which was just worse somehow. Even Simon was convinced that pris life goal was and always had been to be a lumberjack who cut down Christmas trees for happy little families, and remained convinced of that for days and days despite Lachlan’s pleading and careful explanations.
It didn’t help that he had never even celebrated Christmas. The songs that played, inexplicably, all over town square only reminded him of tinny shopping mall music, of his dad rushing through as quickly as he could to buy his shirts as fast as possible so they could get back home. He had fond memories of his bubbe driving in from Yarmouth to see all of them while they were all off from school and his family all lighting the Menorah together, but none of that had anything to do with the saccharine nightmare that was whatever this was.
In the end he had managed to get through to at least a few people. Eugenia, melting into herself and Ziwa a ghost in the flesh, had stayed, rotating around each other in that immaculate, desolate house, and Greer had stayed to try and get through to Eugenia. Stupid, but he understood the impulse. He couldn’t leave fast enough though, once he’d warned people.
Lachlan had gotten Simon into a car and started driving. He had started to learn the rules of this place; that it didn’t matter all that much where he drove, as long as he knew the way home.
The icing-sugar woods of rural wherever-the-hell gave way to sixteen familiar lanes of 401 highway, and Lachlan watched the flickering of black hole warp between the road and the sky all the way home.
---
When he finally made it back to whatever this Toronto was, he wanted to feel relieved, but instead all it did was make everything look even more fake here, too.
Everything was wrong. The way the people spoke to each other on the street was wrong, and so was the way the sun felt on his skin, as if it were all as sharp but without any of the heat. He found himself cold, piling on jackets even as everyone around him seemed to enjoy an endless summer.
It didn’t seem to bother Simon. Simon laughed brightly at his jokes, held on tightly to his arm as they rode the subway out to meet up with old friends in different towns, curled in close to him on the couch while they watched movies Lachlan remembered from his teenage years on an old VHS player and a brand new TV.
How much of it was a lie? He had made one escape, but this was just another prison.
His food tasted all of artificial flavour and burnt ends.
---
Lachlan woke in the middle of the night and went walking.
Outside the air was colder than it should have been in summer, and even at this late hour, there were people on the streets. He gave them wide berths, when he could, staring instead up at that sky, trying to catch it when it broke concentration and showed him straight through to the truth.
You don’t want the truth, came a voice, deep and faraway, as if it dripped out of the black hole’s maw itself.
“Fuck you,” he said, out loud, which made a man in an oversized bucket hat turn and look incredulously at him, but he ignored him.
People think they want the truth, but they don’t. it said, just as calm.
“Fuck you, yes I do. Who are you to say what I want?”
Some things can never be unseen, it said. I will not warn you again.
“Fuck you. Fuck you. Of course I know things can’t be unseen. You think I’ll ever unsee an incineration? Unsee a god puppeting friends and – and kids! York was EIGHT! Am I supposed to unsee standing in front of the sun to kill everyone in sight? Unsee an apocalypse?”
At this point he was yelling, but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t hold back.
“All I fucking do is see things I wish I could unsee! All I do is get thrown around by whatever the hell decided to come cataclysmically ruin my life this week! I am in a fucking black hole! A black hole! I’m not dead but I sure don’t feel alive either, nothing in my life has made any sense since I was a literal child, and I have no choice in any of this! You do not get to tell me what I do and don’t want to see!”
All of a sudden, the streets and the people were gone, and everything was silent and dark.
Not silent and dark like the hush of a crowd, or being alone in a room, or like the night before the dawn. This was an absolute darkness, an absolute silence, a primordial maelstrom that held nothing, was nothing, held everything, was everything. This was the black hole (black hole), as it was, with nothing laid over top of it. The truth.
What do you want to see? It asked, one more time, more softly.
“I want to see everything.”
---
First there was silence, and then that silence folded onto itself, intertwining and braiding until Lachlan could almost hear something in it, a tinkling, a sound, a song. From in it rose a crackling, like the heavy humid-electric hum of Feedback weather, and then the distant rush of Flooding, the nervous hush of Solar Eclipse. It grew louder, the gravity of the black hole (black hole) pulling it closer, and in the rhythm of it there was the warm timbre of his zayda’s voice, reading him a story as a child, and Kennedy’s scream as they burned, and Simon’s laugh after shi had come skidding into home base.
Lachlan looked down, and in his hands was a little snow globe, matchstick towers rising above streets full of ant-like cars rushing from place to place.
“What is this?” he asked, bringing it to his face, trying to catch the details.
It’s your city. The voice answered, still disembodied, but somehow richer, now.
“What do you mean, my city?”
There is infinite potential, in this place. The voice said patiently. There was almost a humor in it now, as if it found his question amusing. In here is the entirety of your world, but the potential of countless more, too. It is too much to see, all at once, so the Players have dreamed themselves sanctuaries in it, made of the warp and weft of future universes.
All at once, Lachlan could see the shape of his apartment, with the bistro tucked just beneath, in perfect miniature.
“Are you saying I made this? All of it?”
Of course you did.
Lachlan looked down at the snow globe, looking for the lie in the voice’s words, but as the streets spun and zoomed between his hands he suddenly sees the thing he has been missing, for all that wrongness.
This city, in which he saw so much mockery of his suffering, looked kinder in this light; something born of a desire for safety. Not a cruel joke, or a wispy imitation, but simply a refuge made of something he had not had, not in a long time. A safe place within the maelstrom.
This place wasn’t real. It was a creation – but a creation of his own. Real, in that the things he did in it were real. Real in that he and Simon and his teammates could have a life together here, if they wanted. The walls crumbled to gravitational dust and that was fine because it was all just a background for what was real, all the things that mattered.
There was something else there, though, something just beyond the edges of his comprehension. Something he had to know.
You need to look deeper, the voice said, but this time Lachlan felt it in his own chest, and he realized suddenly that the voice sounded exactly like his own voice, that it was his own voice, and he started to understand more.
The sound grew and warped until it ceased to be sound, and became the fabric of the black hole, and in it, tangled in the gravity, was the entirety of life itself.
---
For an eternal moment, Lachlan Shelton saw everything.
There were things he would only understand in flashes, later; protecting himself from things no player was meant to know. But in that moment, he saw all of it. The truth of his existence, and of all of theirs. His friends, the incinerations, the way the world rotated. The plane, from an altitude no player was ever meant to see. He saw it all. He understood it all, in that moment. Every existential question that had dogged his life from the moment he had stepped out onto that field, and long before it, and long after – he understood all of it.
And now you have seen all you came to see, he said to himself, as he had been speaking to all along, in the silence that stretched out unto infinity. Did it make anything better? Did it save you?
Everybody and everything he loved burned bright like stars.
Of course it did, he said. Of course it did.
---
When he got home he took out a neatly lined spiral notebook and wrote everything he knew in its pages, wrote until his hand ached and it was nearly six in the morning and the notebook was nearly full. Then, once he had it all down, he tucked it neatly into the shelf, between a thriller novel and a self help book he had picked up on the advice of a therapist forty years ago. Maybe he’d finally get around to reading it, he thought to himself. He had nothing but time now, plenty to sit with it for a while.
By the time the sun came up over a dark void of black hole-sky, he was back in bed, sleeping soundly, Simon snoring softly right beside him.
---
He closed down the bistro the night before the next Fall and held a dinner with everyone that was still there, called them each from their own pockets of paradise into his.
His food was perfect, he knew that. Not because it had to be that way, and not because he had cooked it perfectly, although he had.
It was perfect because he could tell how much people were enjoying it, lingering on it, savoring it between the conversation flowing like wine between them.
There was laughter, at these tables. There was a sadness, a profound one too. It hung heavy like smoke around Eugenia, around Ziwa, who smiled too widely and commented too quickly, who Eugenia clung to as if they might disappear again any moment. It lingered, pepper-like, on Greer, who kept turning as if looking for someone to whisper a comment to.
Mostly, it was tangled into Simon, heavy on xer words, visible in the tight set of xer tense shoulders all day, in the forced laughs at the comments around the table.
He had almost asked fae if something was wrong, after he had brought faer coffee, but then the sun had dripped butter-warm into the window and onto the table, onto the coffee, and he had looked at at Simon’s hopeful, illuminated face and knew that fae had wanted to keep things as they were, just for one more day.
Lachlan had known star was going to fall. He’d known it since before this morning; maybe since the black hole (black hole) had spoken to him. There was a sort of pull on Simon, a gravity, like little ripples in still lake-water, that was almost unmistakeable if you knew how to look. He couldn’t see it on everyone who was going to fall, but he could feel it rolling off of Simon, knew that when the time came, star would fall. And this morning, he had seen it gathering, so strong he felt as if Simon must feel it too.
It would be alright. Maybe it was the perspective of it all, or maybe it was just getting older, or both. He could not imagine Simon in this place, not forever, this dreamland city which was far too small for all hir dreams. His Comet was not a person meant to stay in the same place forever, and he knew that, and besides, shi was periodic, in the ways that mattered. They would meet again one way or another. And maybe it was the black hole talking, but really, time and place and separation – those were no more eternal constants than his menu.
So Simon would fall tomorrow. Lachlan wasn’t sure where vi would land, but he had a good feeling about it, wherever it was. Vi would do great, wherever it was - vi always did.
“I’d like to make a toast,” he said, at one of the lulls in conversation.
“Toast!” Simon echoed, smiling up at him so brightly he couldn’t help but smile too.
“I want to thank all of you, everyone here. It’s been so long – most of you I’ve known for most of my life. You’ve been with me through everything, and it has been such an honour to play with you, to survive with you, to live a life with all of you.
He looked around again, felt every bit of warmth in that room, in every inch of those faces he knew so well.
“Thank you. Thank you all so much. That’s – that’s it.”
“Hear, hear!” called out Workman, raising a glass, Dot following suit and soon the rest of them, all holding their drinks high in the air.
In the gentle cacophony of glasses clinking, Lachlan Shelton heard the subtle, beautiful song the black hole (black hole) had been singing him all along, and as he tapped his, he added his own voice to that infinite chorus.